Economic imbalance is baked into the games.
A runner that trains in a state of the art facility with a nutritionist and physiotherapist on call 24/7 will inherently have an advantage over a runner from a poor country that trains in their spare time at the local high school track. Acting like air conditioning is a step too far is silly.
The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’s five years too late.
Prices for luxury goods are set by what the market will bear.
He also has a company that does anti drone tech for the Department of Defense.
There’s a word for alternative medicine that works. It’s “medicine”.
I forget the attribution.
You should know more people.
Ah yes, the old “I was only pretending to be dumb” excuse.
The fact you’re setting an arbitrary limit of cash in a bank account shows how little you’ve thought about this. Rich people have money in the bank, sure, but the vast amount of their wealth is in stocks, property, and other assets. Also, assuming rich people have one bank account they keep all their money in is foolish. You have to spread your cash around to multiple accounts and even banks in order to not exceed the amount the government is willing to insure.
Yes. You understand how pricing works. The stores charge what the market will bear. That’s why games had been stuck at $60 since the 360/PS3 era.
American ninja warrior has had more and more women making it farther and farther in the competition every year. There are still handicaps in place to make sure at least some women make it to the finals but after that there are no handicaps. At this point, even if they removed all the handicaps there would still be women that reach the finals, just not as many. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The announcers still try to hype up the women’s achievements but at this point most of the big barriers have been broken. They’ve had to resort to stuff like, “if she gets a buzzer here she’ll be only the second mom to get a buzzer in qualifying!”. It’s kind of silly at this point.
I think we’re talking past each other. By ‘popular’ I do not mean ‘well liked’. Just that it was used by a lot of people. 2004, in my opinion, was when steam took off and the downloading updates from random websites phase of pc gaming died. There was a transition, to be sure, but the writing was on the wall. We just didn’t know it at the time.
We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.
I think I just have responded to the wrong comment. My bad.
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
It was awful.
Again, you are very naive. What you’re describe is cost-up pricing which hasn’t been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.
The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc… To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can’t produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.
Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.
You’re wrong. Doubling down won’t make you less wrong.
Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven’t dropped.
Reality does not comport with your argument at all.
I’ve been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You’re very naive.
Literally all pricing is set by the devs and publishers. The guy you’re responding to has no idea what he’s talking about. The Steam store terms of service are public and easily available to read through. I know, I’ve done it. The only pricing requirement they have is keys sold off store can’t be significantly discounted under the store price. That’s it.
Valve doesn’t set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.
The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.
Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.
If valve is a monopoly, it’s only because they’re the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They’re not perfect but they’re orders of magnitude better than the competition.
Ehrlich Bachman, this is your mom and you, you are not my baby.